Many IT departments can benefit from bring packaged software to the enterprise rather than developing custom solutions. In this article, Harris Kern discusses the advantages and possible pitfalls of using packaged software versus "rolling your own."

This article is part of the Harris Kern Enterprise Computing Institute Series. Placing special emphasis on a comprehensive approach combining organization, people, process, and technology, Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute is recognized as one of the world's premier sources for CIOs and IT professionals concerned with managing information technology.

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The mission of IT is to produce useful business applications by all means
necessary. There are many tools and flexible software architectures that will
make the job easier, make the software more bug-free, and make your programmers
more productive. More IT managers have gone on the rocks by failing to bring
internal development programs to completion on time and on budget than by any
other cause. I hope to give you some tips that will help you avoid being one of
the casualties.

Buy Packaged Software? Or "Roll Your Own"?

For many years following the introduction of computers to business in the
1950s, corporate IT departments assumed that they would write most of their
business software. Larger corporations would hire staff programmers to write
corporate information systems, and smaller companies that couldn't afford
their own staff would use consultants to create data systems. Gradually packaged
software emerged, at first to perform standard corporate functions such as
accounting and payroll, and later to do other standardized functions such as
purchasing, human resources tasks, and manufacturing. As technology has
improved, packages have become more flexible so that they can be adapted to
individual businesses, and packaged software is assumed to be suitable for most
core business functions.

With the arrival of integrated enterprise data systems such as SAP, many IT
managers assume that their data architecture can be built entirely around
off-the-shelf software, and in-house capabilities can be abandoned or
outsourced. Before you drop your IT capabilities, however, consider some of the
issues in the use of purchased software and the implications for your business.
Otherwise you may discover after you've let your programming team go that
the package doesn't meet your needs and you need to "roll your
own."